Imaging Tools for Cancer Research

The goal of our work in Biomedical Imaging is two-fold: One, to develop advanced imaging tools for biomedical research in partnership with the National Cancer Institute and other organizations. Secondly, to conduct research in Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) to index and retrieve medical images by image features (e.g., shape, color and texture), augmented by textual features as well. This work includes the development of the CervigramFinder for retrieval of uterine cervix images by image features, SPIRS for retrieval of digitized x-ray images of the spine from NHANES II and a distributed global system (SPIRS-IRMA) for image retrieval by both high-level and detailed features of medical images, in collaboration with Aachen University, Germany.

CBIR is also an aspect of the Image Text Indexing (ITI) project that seeks to automatically index illustrations in medical articles by processing text in figure captions and mentions in the article, as well as image features in the illustrations.